Uneasy Lies the Crown (13 page)

“Stop! Listen to me. What I ask of you —”

“Ask or tell?”

Owain shook her, his voice full of anger. “Damn it! Let him burn this house. Let him level every stone for miles. I will not have you all dead or taken captive.” All at once, the harsh lines in his face went soft. “Tudur and Rhys came not an hour ago directly from Ruthin. Grey’s forces were gathering there. Far more men than he had sworn to limit himself to bringing here. And I doubt he was headed back to Scotland anytime soon. We are all in grave danger. I haven’t the means to keep him from taking this place, if that is his intent.”

“Then we shall all go to Wrexham,” Margaret pleaded. “John and Phillip will help us. You can plead your case with the king or... or some other great lord. Surely there is one who will support you?”

“And put your brothers’ lives at risk? Henry cares not one whit for my case. He has already proven that. Grey is his pet who may take whatever scraps he can wrest from us as reward for his loyalty. No, we must save ourselves first. Save the children.”

Margaret shook her head. The reality was too bitter to accept, the implications too far-reaching, the future too uncertain. “What then? When will I see you again? Where will you go?”

“I... I don’t know when. And as for where, perhaps it’s best you don’t know.”

He pressed her hands together between his and then kissed the ends of her fingers.

Margaret stood as motionless and mute as a cairn battered by a terrible storm. Minutes passed before she realized that Owain had walked off and her children and servants were scurrying past her, urging her to hurry.

“Lady Margaret?” Iolo touched her back from behind. “It’s time. Sir Owain is outside waiting for you.”

Waiting to say farewell.For how long? A few days? Months? Longer?

Iolo took her arm and guided her the length of the corridor and down the stairs, through the hall and out into the fading light of evening.

Isabel stood in the roadway, sobbing, while Alice and Catrin desperately tried to console her. The littlest ones were handed up into the wagons. Their eyes were wide and bright and they chattered incessantly. They thought they were all going on a great adventure together.

Margaret took a breath and searched for Owain. Just as she found him, a rider sped along the road and dropped from his horse before her. It was Sir Dafydd, captain of Owain’s guard.

“They are only a few miles away, m’lady,” Dafydd warned. “You should be safely out of sight and ahead of them if you take the mountain road.”

Behind her, Owain circled his arms about her waist.

“I will send for you as soon as I can,” he said, his breath stirring the hairs on her bare neck.

She could not turn around to face him. She didn’t know what to say. Those days of Owain leaving to fight for King Richard had long been over. How had she been so naïve to think they would never part again?

Owain helped her up into the wagon beside Maredydd, who sat there with his hands gripping the reins and his shoulders hunched, bearing a weight far beyond his fourteen years.

“You know the road, Maredydd,” Owain said. “Dafydd, go with them. You’ll find my cousin Lowarch south of Dolgellau near the ruins of Llys Bradwen. Tell him my instructions. He’ll find a safe place for each of you.”

As Maredydd lifted the reins, Margaret grabbed her son’s wrist to stop him.

“Owain,” she began, holding back the tears that fought to overcome her, and spoke the words that she herself needed to hear, “remember—every day apart, brings us a day closer to being together again. Do what you must, but do not risk your own life. You swore to always protect me. I will hold you to that.”

“I will,” he said. “Now go... and Godspeed.”

“How many?” Owain whispered into the lingering fog. He stood on the furthest hilltop from Sycharth where he could still see his home, or should have been able to, but for the lazy bank of fog that obscured his view. Behind him clustered a gathering of Welshmen, their ear rims red from the winter cold and their hearts blazing with contempt.

Iolo pulled himself up the last of the hill and paused for breath. “Thirty. Unarmed, as sworn.” He drooped forward, one hand upon his knee and the other clutching the sack that cradled his harp. He waited a long moment before looking up again at Owain. “But on the road behind them are sixty more. With more than enough weapons to kill each man here thrice over.”

Hands sought out their swords. Numbering just over twenty, they were more than ready to charge down the hill and rush back into emptied Sycharth, but the odds against them were too great.

“Have they entered the house yet?” Tudur asked timidly of Iolo.

“When I left they were beating at the door.”

Gruffydd, his arms crossed and his face molded into a permanent scowl since earlier that day, spat at the ground. “They’ll burn it. Every last timber.”

They gazed silently through the drifting billows of mist, watching for spires of smoke to rise above the naked branches. Finally, Rhys pulled his sword free and waved it boldly before him. “We can work our way around to the other side and wait above the road for them. I haven’t made good use of this sweet thing for far too long a time.”

Moving in front of him, Gethin swung the blade away with a forefinger. “Do you think they would actually be surprised by an ambush after finding us all gone from the manor? Act with haste and you will lose your life, for certain. Grey won’t burn Sycharth. For now he only wants Sir Owain. Let that be his only aim.”

“How do you know?” Rhys said.

“I make it my business to know. Don’t ask how.”

Rhys’s blade drifted back to his side, but he kept his grip firm. “I do ask. You are the one who convinced Owain to abandon Sycharth, so until I see you spear an English noble, I will wonder how it is you know such things.”

“Yes, how?” Gruffydd said. Since Elise’s swift disappearance, he had become perpetually moody.

“You have been gone these past two days,” Tudur added. “To where?”

Gethin ignored Tudur and moved closer to Rhys, dry twigs snapping under his feet. “You have no cause as yet to doubt me. Time and circumstances will prove where my loyalties rest... and every man’s, as well, be he English, Welsh or Scots. You see, Lord Grey is not a difficult man to understand. His motives are plain. I needn’t any spies to tell me.” He stood so close to Rhys now that his breath hung in a cloud between them. “Land is wealth and wealth is power... and power is
everything
.”

Rhys craned his neck forward until their foreheads were almost touching. “I’ll give you that, Gethin. But swear your loyalty now, so that none here may doubt them.”

Chin held high, Gethin backed away and turned to Owain. “I grant my loyalty fully,” he offered, dropping to one knee, his bare head bowed. “I lay my life in your hands, Owain Glyndwr, and I will give my all until I die, so that others may live their lives in peace. Lead us, just as your princely forebears did.”

Griffith ap David separated himself from the others and bent his knee to the ground in suit. Tom was quick at his side. One after another went down before Owain on the leaf-littered forest floor, until only his son Gruffydd and brother Tudur remained standing.

“You’re all mad and desperate,” Owain said.

Even Rhys had sunk to the frozen ground on both knees. “We are that—mad as they come. Tears of blood and breath of fire. We’d run naked into battle if it would bring us victory. We are, after all, Welshmen and you—our prince.”

Shaking his head, Owain went to his friend and pulled him to his feet. “I don’t want anyone’s life wasted in my name. No battles. No bloodshed. None of that. I want you all to go home.”

“But where will you go?” Rhys gripped Owain’s shoulder. “Sycharth? You’ll be keeping company with the rats in the Tower if you go back there now. Glyndyfrdwy? That’s the very next place they’ll look. Where will you go, Owain?”

Drawing away, Owain peered through the diminishing mists. Grey’s men-at-arms were pouring out of the manor house and had begun scouring the outbuildings, overturning carts and stabbing wildly at stacks of hay. Owain had been certain to leave not so much as a single hen perched on the roosts. Even the dove cotes yawned emptily.

It would not be long before Grey would dispatch search parties into the surrounding hills to ferret out Owain and his kin. He turned his back on the men and began walking a path that only he knew, a remembrance of youth, twisting between tangled saplings, its course hidden beneath fallen leaves.

Owain was halfway down the hillside when the shuffle of feet caused him to pause and look back. Gruffydd, whose eyes had the uncanny keenness of youth, had started forward. His son gripped his uncle Tudur by the shoulder and pointed over the treetops.

“They’re coming,” Gethin said calmly, standing. “To the horses.”

In the silent manner of practiced hunters, they plunged down the far side of the hill to join Owain, their polished swords and daggers glinting silver in the brown tapestry of the woods. A quarter mile from their hilltop post, in a hidden gully, their horses were loosely tethered, waiting for the escape.

Iolo Goch:

Christmas came and went without celebration. How I missed the song, the dance, the food, but most of all the merriment. Lady Margaret and the children were stashed away with Owain’s cousins—some in the mountains south of Cadair Idris, others in Anglesey.

In the upland wilderness of Powys, Owain and his small band roamed from cave to cave. Others came to join them, but Owain turned them all away. Yet in each offer of servitude, Owain noted something that he had never been aware of, not even in himself until the hunger and the cold and the solitude bared it: the courage to fight for what was theirs.

18

Uplands of Mid Wales — February, 1401

While dawn was yet a flirtatious hint of light on the horizon, Owain sat upon the broad back of a sleeping hill pony. There was a sprinkling of frost on its shaggy hide and its head hung low, oblivious to Owain’s frequent shifting. Owain’s shoulder-length hair was gathered at the nape of his neck beneath a black hood that concealed his features. In his company were Rhys and Tudur, who stood just uphill of a meandering flock of horned sheep. It was St. Valentine’s Day and an unusually warm week had revealed irregular expanses of sallow grass on the western slope where they waited. In the vistas beyond, in the kingdom once known as Powys, the dark blue silhouette of the mountains surrounded them.

Rhys stifled a yawn and, supported by a shepherd’s crook, stretched himself taller to peer into the distance. “There.” He nodded in the direction of the narrow road that wound down from a slope to the northwest. “Three riders. And one... appears to be a woman. Unless my eyes deceive me.”

Owain twisted around to watch. As the riders came closer, the sheep lifted their heads and moved a more comfortable distance away, then bent their necks to graze again. The middle rider, wearing a long woolen houppelande, lifted her hood briefly and pushed a few stray locks of hair behind her ears. The first rays of sun caught in her golden strands.

Owain’s heart told him what his eyes could not yet discern. He had not seen his beloved Marged for months now—a string of empty days that might as well have been an eternity. The last of the riders reined his horse to the left and eased it across the gurgling brook.

Turning off the road, the other two riders approached the shepherd’s cottage further up on the hillside, a few hundred feet from Owain and his companions. After dismounting, the woman and one of the men knocked and went inside. The third approached them.

The rider tipped the brim of his hat. A plain wooden cross dangled from a frayed cord about his neck. “A fair and blessed St. Valentine’s, good sir.”

“’Tis fair enough, pilgrim,” Owain said. “But if it’s a bed you seek, we have none. There is a village in the next valley. You’ll find a parish church with open doors there.”

“But is the priest a Welshman?” he said. He was perhaps a few years older than Owain, with a long jaw and deeply cut cheekbones where the flesh of his face had hollowed out.

Lifting his chin, Owain edged his pony close and reached out his hand. “Lowarch, you’ve changed since last we raced barefoot through the hills.”

Rhys gestured to Tudur and they strayed over to their wayward flock, leaving the two men alone.

“Verily, good cousin, and for the better, I pray,” Lowarch said. “I was once a head and a half taller than you, though ’tis no longer so. The years have seen you prosperous and blessed. Your brood makes enough noise to raise the thatch clean off my roof. But my Gwladys would not give them up, having none of her own. Sion and Mary, in particular, are an inquisitive pair. Gwladys gives them chores to keep them from trouble, but they find it anyway. I caution you, Owain, she has spoilt them so much you will not want them back.”

“That would never hold true. Not in a hundred lifetimes. This winter has been long and lonely—an event I care not to repeat. Christmas spent in a cold, damp cave does not inspire a man to rejoice on God’s miracles.” He eyed the cottage door. “Tell me, Lowarch, how has she faired these months?”

Lowarch reached out between their mounts and touched his cousin’s wrist in reassurance. “She is strong, for the children. But I see her in quiet moments, a rare thing at our household these days... I see her taking out your letter and reading it a dozen times over, then watching out the window as if her will could take you both home.”

The smoke of a new fire spiraled upward from the cottage roof. “I dared risk only one letter and told her to write me none. If the English had intercepted it —”

Leaning his head of gray streaked hair toward the cottage door, Lowarch said, “I brought her safely to you. It was all I could do, though, to hold her back from arriving here two days earlier.”

An impatient skylark glided boldly above, fluting its melody. Owain’s eyes followed it—so sure of spring and finding its mate.